WASHINGTON – President Trump continued to cast doubt on his intelligence chiefs and said he doesn’t have to listen to his hand-picked aides.

“I have intel people, but that doesn’t mean I have to agree,” Trump told CBS’ “Face the Nation.”

Trump rebuked his intelligence chiefs last week after his director of national intelligence and leaders of the CIA and FBI testified before Congress on global threats and contradicted the president on Iran, North Korea and ISIS.

In the interview that aired Sunday, Trump pointed out past intelligence failures as reason to reject the intel chiefs he nominated.

“President Bush had intel people that said Saddam Hussein in Iraq had nuclear weapons- had all sorts of weapons of mass destruction,” Trump said. “Guess what? Those intel people didn’t know what the hell they were doing, and they got us tied up in a war that we should have never been in.”

Trump said he won’t prevent his intel chiefs from testifying again, but made clear he would push back on their assessments – especially on Iran.

CIA Director Gina Haspel told lawmakers that Iran is still technically in compliance with the terms of the 2015 nuclear deal, but Trump disagrees.

“My intelligence people, if they said in fact that Iran is a wonderful kindergarten, I disagree with them 100 percent,” Trump said. “It is a vicious country that kills many people.”

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Top Democratic lawmakers, national security experts and other analysts ripped...

Bipartisan lawmakers have raised concerns about Trump’s distrust of his advisers and have questioned his foreign policy claims that run afoul of his experts’ assessments, including whether ISIS is defeated and North Korea will denuclearize.

Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.) Sunday called Trump’s public disputes with his intelligence leaders “troubling to all of us.”

“We should respect them,” Shelby told CNN’s “State of the Union.” “Most of the time, they’re pretty much on point.”

Trump also offered a new explanation as to why his Defense Secretary James Mattis stepped down, which was initially reported as a surprise decision over policy disagreements.

“I wasn’t happy with his service. I told him give me a letter,” Trump said.

“He resigned because I asked him to resign,” Trump said. “He resigned because I was very nice to him. But I gave him big budgets and he didn’t do well in Afghanistan. I was not happy with the job he was doing in Afghanistan.”